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Sir Norman Fowler (Sutton Coldfield): Our general attitude is that strict immigration control is necessary to good race relations. We shall back any measures to improve race relations and to create full equality of opportunity. We shall also back any effective measures to prevent illegal immigration. In far too many cases, applications for political asylum are a means to evade immigration control. As the Home Secretary and the
White Paper say, three quarters of asylum applications are refused because they do not meet the requirements of either refugee status or exceptional leave to remain. Only 6 per cent. of appeals are successful.
Even at that, however, the Home Secretary plans to spend almost £1 billion over the next three years on support of asylum seekers. That is almost four times what he plans to spend on his new crime programme, and it is almost as much as total extra spending on the police during the same period. It must be sensible to reduce that bill radically, and to divert the money to better purposes.
Does the Home Secretary feel on reflection that the position in the United Kingdom would have been substantially improved if the Labour party had not with great ferocity opposed our Bills in 1993 and 1996? Does he recall that the Prime Minister, then shadow Home Secretary, played down the seriousness of the issue because of a temporary fall in applications?
If not, the right hon. Gentleman will perhaps remember that, when he was shadow Home Secretary, he opposed us when we proposed benefit withdrawal. He did not say that our changes were insufficient, as he appears to argue now. He said then that they were far too stringent. We shall support his changes to the benefit system, but we know that, if the Conservative Government had proposed them, Labour spokesmen would have toured the country condemning them. We are not prepared to take lectures from the Home Secretary or the Labour party on effective immigration control, because they opposed virtually all our measures to tackle abuse.
The White Paper is important enough to require a full day's debate, and I hope that the Government will arrange one. For now, I have three sets of questions. First, much of our immigration control system depends on border controls, to which we are committed, and to which we hope the Government are committed.
The Home Secretary has referred to the vast increase in passenger traffic to 100 million passengers in two years time. He is giving immigration officers more power, but is he satisfied that there are enough of them to police our borders effectively? He also intends to introduce a new right of appeal for visitors. Is there a danger that that will put more pressure on the appeals system, just when he is trying to reduce pressure?
Secondly, the Home Secretary abolished the primary purpose rule last year. Previously, applicants had to prove that gaining entry to the United Kingdom was not the primary purpose of their marriage. The latest Home Office figures show a significant increase in applications from spouses. Does that trend continue into 1998? Will he give us the latest figures?
Thirdly, and most importantly, the Home Secretary has said that there will be no amnesty for political asylum applicants because of the time that they have been waiting. However, the statement was less than forthcoming, compared with the White Paper, on the right hon. Gentleman's intentions.
Will there not now be two special provisions for asylum applicants? Ten thousand people who have been waiting since before July 1993 will now normally be given indefinite leave to remain. Will the right hon. Gentleman confirm that that is the position? In addition, 20,000
people who made applications between mid-1993 and the beginning of 1996 will also be considered under special criteria not available generally. They will have been waiting not seven or five years, but two and a half or three years.
Will the Home Secretary explain the detail of that second scheme, which affects so many people? Does it not mean that 30,000 of the 50,000 people waiting for initial decision will be considered under special criteria not available generally, and that, certainly with one group, settlement will be the normal, almost automatic, outcome, when he has said that the average of false applications is very high? That is the background against which the policy is set. For all those reasons, the Opposition will want to examine those two schemes in particular with great care.
We have heard the Home Secretary's words. We want to monitor carefully the effect of what he has announced. We fear that his plans in action may not match up to the words that he has used this afternoon.
Mr. Straw:
The right hon. Gentleman asks for a full day's debate on this important White Paper. I would welcome that, but it is a matter for business managers. I will pass on his request to them.
The right hon. Gentleman made some curious assertions, given the record of the previous Administration. He first complained that the costs of asylum support given on the last page of the White Paper are likely to add up to £1 billion over the next three years. That is simple arithmetic, but had we not taken the costs in hand, our inheritance meant that the figures would have risen to about £800 million in a single year. Anything up to £2 billion could have been wasted on support of applicants and those awaiting removal and deportation in a system that was a shambles from beginning to end. That was the system we found when we came into office.
I have read the debates in which my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and I took part in 1992-93 and 1995-96. One reason that we opposed those measures was that we said that they would not deliver the changes--[Laughter.] Oh, yes we did. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, then the shadow Home Secretary, once a distinguished position--the jury is still out on whether it is still distinguished--said:
Let me deal with the right hon. Gentleman's explicit questions. On border controls, he asked whether there will be enough immigration staff. Again, this is an area that he should have researched more. The staff numbers in the immigration service were to have been cut and cut again under the spending plans that we inherited. We are arranging over the next three years to put an extra £124 million into immigration and asylum control. We
have put some more money in already precisely to deal with the rising number of visitors and the overhang of asylum applications.
The right hon. Gentleman made a serious point about whether the new right of appeal for visitors refused a visit for family purposes could put pressure on the appeal system as a whole. We do not intend that it should. It will be a separate, self-contained, streamlined system. As we make clear in the White Paper, it will be a system whose costs will be paid by the applicants.
The right hon. Gentleman asked about the numbers who have applied for settlement as spouses following the ending of the primary purpose rule on 5 July last year. He is right to say that numbers have increased. That was bound to be the case, because there was a huge logjam. The Opposition, under the previous shadow Home Secretary, now the shadow Foreign Secretary, had every opportunity to oppose the abolition of the primary purpose rule and make a prayer in this House to negate my changing the rules. They did not, and the decision had the surprising vocal support of the hon. Member for Rochford and Southend, East (Sir T. Taylor). He and many other Conservative Members recognised the injustice of the rule, and the fact that it offered no serious means of control.
The right hon. Gentleman's last point concerned our proposals for dealing with the backlog, which are set out in full in paragraphs 8.29 and 8.30 on page 41 of the White Paper. For those who made initial applications before 1 June 1993 that have still not had an initial decision, we are saying that delay in itself will normally be considered so serious as to justify as a matter of fairness the grant of indefinite leave to remain.
"No one on the Opposition Benches condones bogus applications for asylum: everyone condemns them. However, weeding out false claims should not be at the expense of prejudicing genuine claims, and that is our fear about the Bill."--[Official Report, 2 November 1992; Vol. 213, c. 36.]
The effect of that, and the 1996 Bill, was to create the worst of all possible worlds, in which genuine asylum seekers were left in limbo for years while their applications were considered, while the very delays that the Bills had established enabled bogus asylum seekers to come, claim benefit, work and carry on ripping off the system.
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